A story appeared on Technology Review today called Mining the Moon. It covers the problems with tokamak reactors, and in particular the extreme unlikelihood of them ever being able to make use of He-3. It then goes on to discuss IEC research being done at U. Wisconsin-Madison.

The author (Mark Williams) seems amazingly ignorant of Dr. Bussard's research, which doesn't even get a mention. But his readers are not; there were already two mentions of it in the comments (including a pointer to this forum) before I stumbled across the article.

There are a couple of interesting tidbits in this. First, The UW researchers are already tackling the engineering problems of direct energy production from charged fusion products. Second, it turns out that their research comes not from government grants, but mainly from "two wealthy individuals who are... only interested in the research and without expectation of financial profit."